1st to Fight (Earth at War)

by Rick Partlow

  I didn’t bother to look at what it had done to the deck, but I assumed it was bad and I wanted to avoid it happening to me. I was aiming the plasma gun before I hit the ground and pushed the triggers about the same time as my boots touched. The extra punch from the discharge put me on my ass, which would have been pretty damned embarrassing if I hadn’t hit the target like a boss.

  “Yeah!” I blurted reflexively in the glow of the expanding halo of gas.

  Metal sublimated from the gun turret in the side of the pod, the source of the shot that had almost got me, and sparks flared from electromagnetic coils shattering under the heat of the plasma. The boarding pod pulled away in a desperate blast of maneuvering jets, their ignition a puff of white smoke at the nose, spinning them upward, facing the main drive bell downward.

  Something prickled down the back of my neck as I realized the pod was less than a hundred meters overhead and I remembered something I’d read in another, much more talented writer’s books way back when I was a little kid and people read paper books.

  A reaction drive's efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive.

  Corporal Quinn stepped between me and the yawning drive bell and tested whether the plasma gun could indeed be fired multiple times. The answer, we both found out in a brand-new sunrise, was yes.

  In the half-second between him bringing the gun to his shoulder and firing, I had the thought to yell at him not to target the drive bell, figuring the interior of a rocket engine might be tough enough to take a hit from the plasma gun without significant damage. I didn’t need to worry. Quinn, as Jambo and I had intuited earlier, was pretty smart for a Ranger. His shot went the one place I would have aimed if I’d had ten seconds or so to consider it: the maneuvering jets on the starboard bow of the pod.

  Plasmoid was the technical term for what the gun shot, and the plasmoid burned through the thin hull plating over the maneuvering thruster fuel tanks like it wasn’t there. I don’t know if it ignited the reaction mass, but it definitely blew a hole in the side of the pressurized tank and the result was one, long, unplanned steering jet, pinwheeling the ship around in an uncontrolled spin. I thought it was going to crash into the construction spar and crush us beneath it, and I scrambled to my feet, trying to get out of its way, but there was some backwards thrust to the expelled gas and instead, the pod smashed into the drydock structure.

  It was a little like watching a car accident, and even though there was still another threat out there, another armed pod, I couldn’t look away. I wasn’t sure which would come off worst, but if I’d had to put money down, it would have been on the drydock, since I figured they had to have taken the possibility of ship collisions into account when they designed it.

  I would have been wrong. The pod smashed through the window, whatever clear metal or plastic the Helta thought was strong enough to guard against micrometeorites not quite sturdy enough to take the impact of a spinning spacecraft. Ice crystallized on the jagged edges of the window and vapor sprayed out in white puffs as the atmosphere evacuated.

  “Sir, the other ship is moving away,” Quinn told me.

  I was on my feet, the plasma gun still at my shoulder and ready to take a shot at the vessel, but Quinn was right. Maneuvering jets spewed vapor on the side of the remaining pod, pushing it out away from the spar a few hundred meters before the drive bell flared from the main engine.

  “Do you think he’s out of range?” Masterson asked, fumbling with the gun he’d picked up.

  “If he wasn’t,” I ventured, “he’d probably be shooting at us.”

  “So, where’s he going?” Quinn wondered.

  The stubby cylinder rode its boost past the end of the spar, the drive bell going dark after only a couple seconds of burn, and then maneuvering jets began to spin it around.

  “Shit!” I yelled. “He’s going after the tender!” I waved at Quinn and Masterson. “Come on, follow me and bring those guns!”

  Boarding the tender reminded me of the first time I’d set foot on the Truthseeker out of the airlock from the Selene, except in reverse. It was surreal, walking off the end of an impossible footbridge into empty space and leaving gravity behind with one footstep. Someone in Svalinn armor grabbed my hand and pulled me into place in the open passenger compartment and I sailed past most of the Ranger squad, nearly shooting out the other side before I grabbed at a strut and came up short with a painful jolt in my shoulder. The gun had no weight out in free fall, but it still had a bunch of mass and Isaac Newton wanted the damned thing to keep going.

  “Brannas-Fel!” I called. “Twist this thing’s tail and get us the hell out of here!”

  “Was that supposed to translate as something,” the Heltan wondered, “or were you cursing at me?”

  I wanted to, right then. Wanted to curse him and the people who’d programmed the translator.

  “Turn on the rockets and head for the cruiser,” I said. “Did you get that?”

  “I believe so. Hold onto something.”

  “Masterson, Quinn, over here with me. Guns out the side.”

  The two Rangers barely had a chance to find a handhold when the tender’s engine ignited and we were all nearly tossed backwards into the metal grating separating the crew compartment from the fuel tanks. Stars moved and so did the Tevynian boarding craft, and I struggled to bring the awkward mass of the plasma gun to bear on the thing. Masterson fired before I could, his shot going wide again. I wanted to bitch him out for missing both times he’d fired, but I bit back the words. It was an unfamiliar weapon with sights and triggers designed by aliens and you can only expect so much from an Army puke.

  The boarding pod was side-on to us, slipping back as our drive continued its burn and I took my best guess as to the nature of the animated conch shell of an aiming reticle and fired. I was dead on. The plasmoid took over a second to travel the distance between the tender and the pod and I intuited it was traveling less than a quarter of lightspeed, which wasn’t slow for a bullet but was a little on the dawdling side for an energy weapon. The round hit, I was sure of it, but nothing seemed to happen, not an explosion, not a violent maneuver, not so much as a transient glow.

  “Out of range,” Quinn guessed.

  “Oh, damn,” Ginger murmured from somewhere. All the armor looked alike. “Sir, I think he’s going to get on our tail where you can’t take a shot at him and pick us off at his leisure.”

  “No, he’s not.”

  I didn’t recognize the voice until I checked the tiny comms screen on my HUD. It was, I found out, Captain Holden.

  “The shuttle!” That was Gus, who I hadn’t heard utter two words the whole mission. “It’s at our twelve o’clock!”

  I couldn’t see a damned thing through the cross-beam cage between the crew compartment and the cockpit, so I muttered a curse and leaned as far out the side as I could without losing my grip. And there it was.

  It was impressive seen in open space, a hammerhead shark but now in its natural ocean. Its drives were supernovae compared to the low-powered engines of the tender and the boarding pod, and when it fired its chin cannon, there was no doubt at all of the range. The rounds from the coil gun were barely visible, just shooting stars of reflection from the drydock’s floodlights, but their effect was much more obvious. The boarding pod ripped in half, riddled by depleted uranium slugs, and I thought I saw a tiny human figure spill out of the opening, maybe just one of the crew who’d neglected to strap in.

  “Sorry we took so long,” Holden said. The shuttle cut its drive, then began to pull a skew flip for braking burn. “We had to wait for the rear guard at the airlock to re-board. Follow me and I’ll lead you to the Truthseeker. No room for that thing in the new ship’s cargo bay…she comes with a full complement of shuttles and spare parts to make three more.”

  “Thank God,” Quinn said, breaking into the open channel with the comment. I didn’t chew him out. It was better than we’d expected.

  “Don’t be
thanking anyone yet…those Tevynian cruisers are coming after us hell bent for leather. I don’t think we’re getting out of this system without a fight.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I was breathing hard when I hit the bridge of the Truthseeker, catching myself against the doorframe to stop my headlong sprint. Oliver and Julie looked around at my entrance, their expressions equally grim.

  “They said down in the cargo bay that you wanted me up here, sir,” I told Olivera, still gasping.

  It felt odd being out of the armor after moving and fighting and living in it for most of the day. The breeze from the ventilators was a chill down my back, evaporating some of the sweat staining my uniform jacket. It had felt even odder leaving the Delta team back in the cargo bay with Ginger in command.

  “That was good work getting those hyperdrives,” Olivera said. His eyes closed for just a beat and he shook his head. “I’m sorry about Master Sergeant Bowie. The man was a legend.”

  “He was my friend,” I said simply. Now that I had time to think, an emptiness had opened up inside my chest and I had to blink at something in my eye. I wasn’t the kind of guy who refused to cry, but I wasn’t going to do it in front of the whole bridge crew.

  Julie gave me a sympathetic look, but said nothing, hands weaving patterns in the haptic hologram of her control station even when she was facing away from it.

  “Did you need me for something, sir?” I wondered, stepping closer, leaning against the edge of Olivera’s command station, exhaustion wearing at me. I was coming down from a series of adrenaline highs and I was going to collapse soon unless I got either sleep or caffeine. And I never had managed to smuggle any Diet Cokes onto the ship.

  “The Tevynian cruisers pulled a micro-jump,” he said, his tone grim as if he’d announced all our deaths. “It put them about a light minute from us, and while we could jump out of the system right now, the ship we salvaged can’t.”

  “Why not?” I asked, thinking of the Rangers we’d left on the ship. “Did they not take the bridge?”

  “They did-—” Oliver began, but Joon-Pah finished the sentence for him.

  “But they damaged the helm control station,” the Heltan said. I knew him well enough now to translate the expression on his face as worried, tense. “Normally, they could use the auxiliary control room to fly her, but the ship was having work done on the control linkages between those stations and the computer core.”

  “Oh, shit.” Fucking Army. We kept them out of Engineering and they still managed to find something to break.

  “The Helta engineers you left on board think they can get it fixed,” Olivera added. “But they’re going to need time. Time we may not have.” He gestured at the tactical display where three threat icons were nearly on top of our position.

  “Have you thought about evacuating the ship with one of the shuttles and making do with the hyperdrives?”

  Olivera glared at me balefully. “The President himself told me this was probably the most important military mission in the history of human civilization. I doubt he’d approve of abandoning the one thing that might give us a fighting chance against the Tevynians.”

  “And why did you want me here?” I asked again, shaking my head. “And if you say it was for luck, I swear to God, I’m going back to my cabin.”

  “We’ve had a grand total of one space battle,” Julie reminded me. “And you came up with the idea that helped us win it. I’d say that’s more than luck, Andy.”

  “We want you here,” Olivera agreed. “And if you do nothing but bring me luck, well….” He motioned at the screen. “We can use all the luck we can get.”

  “They’re going to be in firing range of their particle beam weapons in two minutes,” Major Baldwin announced. She didn’t sound any happier than Olivera, and if the Helta crew weren’t as tense as Joon-Pah, it was only because they didn’t understand the gravity of the situation…or had an unrealistic faith in us humans.

  “We’re just going to sit here?” I asked. “I mean, I know we can’t leave the system, but we aren’t going to try to maneuver?”

  “We are,” Olivera assured me. “Right after we lure them in.”

  “They know the effective range of the particle cannon as well as we do.” And it was, in my opinion, shit. I mean, it was a devastating weapon, but at a range of just a few hundred kilometers, you basically had to close in like old sailing ships and trade fucking broadsides.

  “Oh, that’s right,” Olivera said, smiling thinly. “We never did read you in to the new weapons system we installed.”

  I was exhausted and depressed and not firing on all cylinders and I stared at him blankly.

  “Colonel Nieves,” he said, still grinning at me, “slave Helm to Tactical. Major Baldwin, target the lead ship with the impulse gun.”

  “Helm slaved to Tactical,” Julie acknowledged, then shot Baldwin a dirty look. “Don’t scratch the car.”

  “Realigning the ship for the spinal mount,” Baldwin reported, and I could see it on the holographic projection.

  A simulation of the Truthseeker floated at the center of it, only a few hundred kilometers from the spiderweb structure of the shipyard and the Helta cruiser still docked there. The Truthseeker rotated counterclockwise about twenty degrees and aimed its nose at one of the Tevynian ships boosting in about a thousand klicks away from us, just outside particle cannon range. And I didn’t know why we were bothering.

  “What the hell is an impulse gun?” I asked, sounding a bit snarky and disrespectful, but past caring.

  “The ship’s warp field is a damned useful thing, as it turns out,” Julie said, twisting around in her seat to face me now that she’d surrendered control of the ship to Baldwin, temporarily anyway. “It acts as a sublight drive, it rips open the wormhole to hyperspace, serves as the basis for the defense shield…all because it can distort the fabric of spacetime. But we figured out from your little pinball maneuver that if it can launch a ship away from it at relativistic speeds, it can do the same thing to a three-meter long tungsten penetrator.”

  A light went on inside my head and I nearly staggered backward at the beautiful simplicity of it. “That’s brilliant,” I admitted.

  “It’s brilliant once,” Olivera corrected me. “Once per engagement, anyway, because we can only fire it in a direct line with the cannon’s spinal mount, and, after they figure out what it is, all they have to do is keep out of its way. Not to mention that the capacitors take about six minutes to charge between shots.”

  “Even if it works, it will still be two to one,” Joon-Pah lamented. “And I have doubts that your—what did you call it? I doubt that your pinball maneuver will work with two enemy ships.”

  “Ten seconds until the lead ship hits the point of no return,” Baldwin said.

  At my curious expression, Julie explained. “That’s when they won’t have enough time to react before the shot hits them. With the warp field, they could hop right out of the slug’s way if we gave them a few minutes warning.”

  “And if they see it,” Baldwin added. “It’s not exactly a shining star on thermal, and lidar or radar would have to reflect back, which takes time at these distances.”

  “Fire at your discretion, Major,” Olivera instructed her, interrupting the impromptu lesson.

  “Everyone hold onto something,” Baldwin advised. “You might actually feel this.”

  And feel it we did. I’d gripped the back of Olivera’s chair tightly at her warning and I was still nearly tossed forward to the deck at what felt very much like a sharp, violent braking boost, except on a ship that didn’t use reaction engines. I figured out what had happened easy enough. Using a mass driver for propulsion had never been my favorite concept—it was inelegant and brute force and didn’t fit in well with my type of science fiction. But the principle was, if you’ll pardon the pun, rock solid. The expulsion of the mass of the impulse gun round at such a high velocity recoiled in the opposite direction, and only the ship’s drive
field kicking back in a microsecond later kept us from drifting backwards.

  It was even more violent for the Tevynian ship. I knew a little about the shields because I’d bugged Joon-Pah about it one day on the bridge, since they were the only thing keeping us from a horrible death and I had wanted some details on how unlikely said horrible death might be. The strength of the shield was proportional to the output of the power source behind them, and you could overload them with enough energy, kinetic or otherwise. Like the kinetic energy of a solid chunk of metal the size of a minivan slamming into them at a good chunk of lightspeed.

  The enemy cruiser seemed to flex and distort as its warp field collapsed, just the faintest of impressions, like it might have been an optical illusion, but what happened next was very real. The ship went supernova. I’m being imprecise, but that’s what it looked like from the bridge of the Truthseeker, like a star had exploded. The globe of white kept expanding, reaching out dozens of kilometers, filling the display and I gritted my teeth, waiting for it to swallow us up even though I knew it had to be just a trick of perspective, that there was no way an explosion that far away could…

  “Hold on!” Joon-Pah warned, grabbing the arms of his chair and closing his eyes.

  Oh, shit. I’d been in a major earthquake once, in Chile. I’d been there on leave, flew Allie down because it was faster than me trying to get back to the States, and we both thought it would be more fun. And it had been great, right up to the point that our hotel had started shaking.

  This feeling was the same, and as hard and violent as the vibration through the ship’s hull was, what hit even harder was the claustrophobic realization that there was no outside to escape to. I was on my knees and didn’t remember falling, the trembling rising from the deck into the palms of my hands as if the ship itself was just as afraid as I was. There’d been yells and screams and the sort of hooting and honking the Helta made when they got excited, and it died down into gasps and nervous muttering as the nebula of gas on the screen began to fade, leaving nothing at all at its heart.